Loomview

A live wallpaper engine for Android that renders interactive HTML directly on your home screen.

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What is Loomview?

Loomview is an open-source Android live wallpaper app that lets you set any HTML file as your home screen wallpaper. If it runs in a browser, it runs on your wallpaper.

• Particles, WebGL shaders, canvas animations — anything web-based works.
• Touch-reactive — your wallpaper can receive and respond to finger touches.
• Fully offline — files are loaded directly from your device via the Storage Access Framework. No cloud, no tracking.

Screenshots

Demo.webm

If you're interested in the live wallpaper effect shown in the screenshots, it was created using another project of mine. Feel free to check it out: https://bokehdepthstudio.com

Features

• 🌐 Renders HTML/CSS/JavaScript via the system WebView (Chromium)
• 🎨 Built-in file browser with grid/list view, favorites, and recents
• ⚙️ Render quality settings (Native / Standard / Saver) and FPS cap
• 🔋 Auto-downgrade on low battery
• 🌙 Light / Dark / System theme
• 🌍 Multilingual (English, Traditional Chinese)
• 🖼️ Gradient thumbnail previews in the system wallpaper picker

Requirements

• Android 8.0 (API 26) or higher
• Android Studio Hedgehog or newer (to build from source)

Building from Source

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/loomview.git
   cd loomview

2. Open the project in Android Studio.

3. Let Gradle sync automatically.

4. Click Run ▶ to build and install on your device or emulator.

Note: The app uses the Storage Access Framework (SAF) — no READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission is required. HTML files are picked via the system file picker.

Architecture

Loomview is a 100% native Android app built with modern Android best practices:

Layer	Technology
UI	Jetpack Compose + Material 3
Live Wallpaper Engine	WallpaperService + WebView + VirtualDisplay
Data Persistence	Room (file records) + DataStore (settings)
Dependency Injection	Hilt
Image Loading	Coil
File Access	Storage Access Framework (SAF)

How the Wallpaper Engine Works

The core challenge is rendering a hardware-accelerated WebView (with WebGL support) inside a WallpaperService, which normally does not provide a window for hardware acceleration.

Loomview solves this using the Presentation + VirtualDisplay pattern:

1. A VirtualDisplay is created mirroring the physical screen dimensions.
2. A Presentation window is attached to it, providing a proper hardware-accelerated Window.
3. The WebView is hosted inside this Presentation, enabling full WebGL support.
4. The rendered output flows from the VirtualDisplay to the wallpaper surface.

Contributing

Contributions, issues, and feature requests are welcome! Feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request.

License

Copyright 2026 Loomview Contributors

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0